


Mint Condition

by deliverusfromsburb



Series: Tuesjade Prompts [9]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, TLC compliant, mentions of mind control, vague descriptions of That Thing we did to Jake in TLC, you know the one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-23 06:20:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13184166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: tuesjade prompt: art supplies





	Mint Condition

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I will get these all transferred over at some point. I am just moving very slowly.  
> Anyway, a few details here may be confusing if you're not familiar with the AU it refers to, but it shouldn't be too bad.

Jade isn't in the greenhouse or napping in the common room (or even halfway up a tree, which is where you found her last time you went looking) so you check her bedroom, which maybe you should have done first. There she is, flat on her back and flicking pennies at the ceiling. Instead of dropping back down onto her pillow, they settle into orbit around her head like a glittering halo. When you walk in, they fall in a copper shower around her shoulders.

"Jake!” she says from beneath a pile of loose change. “Do you need something?"

"Not need, exactly." You hover at the doorway until she motions for you to come in. "It's more that I'm here to ask you something. You see, Calliope and I have been working on a comic together."

"Oh, is that what you two have been hiding away to work on? We were wondering what you were up to." She sits up and pats the bed. Stray pennies clink and shift. "Can I see it?"

"As a matter of fact, I did bring some samples along." You're a little shy, but if you can't show your fumbling attempts at artwork to your grandmother, who can you trust? Calliope took the reins for most of the first booklet anyway. "Behold!” You hold out the hand-stapled collection of pages with a flourish. “The brand new adventures of our enterprising heroes."

She pages through your first issue, complimenting the art and laughing aloud at your cornier jokes. “My grandpa used to make that exact pun, you know," she says, tapping one speech bubble you were proud of.

"That stroke of genius must be hereditary."

She smiles down at the panel for a moment before turning the page. "Guess so."

“It’s funny,” you say. “Speech bubbles feel so… constrictive, for some reason. I know it’s a function of the medium, but you just can’t fit that many words in. You’d think I’d be used to it, since I’ve read my fair share of the funnies. But I keep thinking, how can they say everything they need to? They have to be so terse. It makes for a lot of revising.”

“You’ll get it with practice,” she promises. “And then we’ll all notice you’re sending us monosyllabic texts!”

“Wouldn’t that be the day?” You chuckle. “You’d probably come in guns a-blazing assuming I’d been jacked by some sort of body double again!” That is a line of thought you maybe don’t want to go too far down, though, so you shut up and let her read. When she reaches the end, you clear your throat. "I wanted to ask if you'd like to be a guest artist. We're trying to get as many people as we can for different issues, so it can be a group project." Calliope took a while to sell you on that. Some of your friends have _actual_ talent. Their work will make your scribbles look pitiful. Still, you saw her point in the end. These things are more fun done together. And she's promised to stab people with pencils if they laugh.

"That sounds like a lot of fun. I haven't drawn in..." She shakes her head. "I don't know. A long while! I'm not great at it, but it was a nice way to pass the time."

"Oh grandma, you're being modest. You were always the best at arts and crafts.” Once you’d gotten into some old paints and left a trail of child-sized handprints on the wall. Instead of yelling, your grandmother had handed you a brush, and the two of you had covered the plain surface with a mural of swirling colors and flowers. It was one of the things you missed most when your house exploded. “The things you could do with a magazine collage were sheer magic."

"I don't know about your version of me, but this me is no Picasso." She waves her hands, and a sketchbook appears between them. You’d expect something with glitter or drawings of flowers – Jade is no stranger to the stereotypically “girly” end of accessorizing, even with deconstructed appliances and a few odds and ends of weaponry stacked up in the corner of her room - but the leather binding is plain and worn. "Here are some things I did before the game."

You open the book to the first page and blink. You know that handwriting. “Is this… mine?”

“Oh, that’s right.” She reaches over you and turns over a big chunk of pages. “This used to be one of my grandfather’s journals. He drew schematics for inventions or sketches of wildlife he’d discovered on his explorations. Sometimes he’d take me out on an “expedition”. He’d take field notes, and I’d imitate him by trying to draw what I saw. That’s how I got started doing art, actually. After he died, I kept it up. Maybe using his book was disrespectful, but…” She shrugs, reaching a page where no more of your – your other self’s – writing is visible. “I always thought he wouldn’t mind.”  

The sketchbook feels different in your hands now that you know your alternate self once held it. Heavier. You try to put it out of your mind. You have drawings from the Jade who is right here. Her lines are thick and defined, like a child's crayon drawings. Of course, she would have been a child then. Here's a doodle of a school classroom, with Jade and Bec behind a desk. The other students... They’re not pretty, but one of them has clunky square glasses. Another wears a headband. "Are those John and Rose?"

She laughs. "Yes. They hadn't sent me pictures yet, but I'd seen them in the clouds. I liked hearing about school, even when they complained. They never understood why I pestered them for so many details, but I wanted to imagine myself going too. Maybe they’re right and I wouldn’t have liked it, but I hated having to wait until they came home to tell them something. I had all their time zones memorized."

Her human faces are clumsy and cartoonish, but she has an eye for rendering detailed objects in perspective. Students like flat paper dolls sit behind three-dimensional desks. "You could be an architect," you say.

"I had a Pictionary modus, so I had to be accurate," she explains. "I was never as good at people. I didn't have anyone to practice with."

You nod, flipping further. "Going off a picture just isn't the same." Here's something different. She's drawn a figure fast asleep. The lines are sketchier and more uncertain, with a realistic softness the other drawings are missing. This time, you’re confident assessing their identity. “You drew John?”

"I tried to get a good look at him while I was dreaming on Prospit," she says. "Then I drew him from memory afterward. I thought about asking him to pose a few times once we were on the battleship, but I couldn't think of a way to ask that wouldn't sound silly."

"So you resorted to candids, did you?" The last few pages of the sketchbook are populated with quick doodles built from lighter lines. The jointed fingers of a carapacian. John wearing his long windsock hood, gesturing broadly with his hands. Dave, no, it would be Davesprite, hiding a half-smile with one hand. An echidna curled in a tight ball with its tongue poking out. It would set your behind ablaze to say any of them are photorealistic, but you can tell what they're supposed to be. After those you find renderings of the innards of the battleship, a mess of interlocking pipes and conduits. Now these you'd believe were ripped out of a user's manual. The rest of the pages are blank. "Did they catch on?"

She snatches the sketchbook back. "No. They don't know about it, so don't show them."

"Have you been sketching me at all?" You strike a pose, lifting your chin in the air. "How’s my profile?"

"Stop teasing, I haven't drawn anything in years." The book vanishes, and she puts her hands on her hips. "So you see, I'm not sure I'd be very good at it."

"I'm much worse than you, and I'm one of our lead storyboarders. Calliope insisted she wasn't doing all the visual components. Apparently I'm supposed to _learn_ and _grow_." You tug at her elbow until she drops her arms. "Don't you want to learn and grow, Jade? Isn't that what you Space players are all for?"

She puffs out her cheeks. "Fiiiine. I guess I can pick up some colored pencils again."

"There's just one thing..." Oh rats, you hadn't thought of how this would come across. "Our guest artists... policy is that they do the villains. To keep the heroes consistent and all that. Is that ok?" You hurry on. "You could be a werewolf, or a mad professor who gets turned into some creature after exposure to magical radiation. You know, something fun."

She blows her cheeks back out. "Radiation sickness isn't much fun. I might prefer a well-intentioned extremist. Maybe I destroy corporations for harming the environment."

"But..." You hesitate. "Is that a heroic thing to do, when you boil it down? Greater good, and all that. It might be more of an anti-hero occupation, so to speak."

"Not when you're hurting the employees," she says firmly. Going evil for a few hours has given her a very rigid sense of morality. You suppose ‘the end justifies the means’ is less compelling when you were once the victim of such logic.  You don’t take that much of a shine to it in fiction yourself these days, although you try to see all sides of the matter, even if you have to bend yourself into a pretzel trying.

"We could convince you to let them go first... No." You shake your head. "It doesn't fit our profile to become anarchists. We'll have to save that for our gritty reboot in a few decades."

"I'll go with something more ethically simple."

"So it's ok with you?"

She pats your hand. "I'm not going to get offended about it. I know I was the bad guy for a while. Pretending to do it again won't hurt me."

"I know I wouldn't want to relive it."

"It was different for you.” She looks down at her hands, and you wonder if she’s remembering them ashen gray. “I didn't have a bunch of people living in my head. After the first moment, it was just me, the worst bits, along with my orders. It's not like you wanted to rip anybody's heart out."

You shudder. Caliborn had shoved you to the back of your mind, where you kept company with a bunch of silly green men and a spooky clown, but you'd caught flashes of the outside world. He was happy leaving you to feel your body's pain. Human hands weren't meant to take that kind of punishment, but the vision-blurring impact hadn't prevented you from seeing one of your best friends die. "Can we talk about something more cheerful?"

Her ears pull back slightly. "I didn't mean to upset you."

"And here I was worried about upsetting _you_.” You force a laugh and flex your fingers to chase out their phantom ache. “I guess we know which of us is made of sterner stuff."

"You're pretty tough," she says, poking you in the shoulder. "You're our adventure guy."

"Mostly in comics.” You’ve written your heroes as brave to a fault, never hesitating to rush in to the rescue. Maybe flawed heroes are “in”, but you have more than your share of those to work through. There’s nothing wrong with a little wish fulfillment. “My alter ego is much braver than I ever was."

“Them?” She flicks her fingers to dismiss the offending characters, the same gesture she uses when someone complains about dishwashing duty. "They're just made up. You're the real deal. And you made it through the worst a bored comic book writer could ever throw at you."

You trace over the cover of your comic book thoughtfully. "We _are_ the grittier reboot."

She laughs. “That’s right. We are! So now you can enjoy your… less gritty reboot, if that’s a thing comics do.”

“We could have a beach episode.”

“Sure.” She leans back and claps her hands together. “Name a day, and I’ll take us back over to the island. We’ll make a vacation out of it.”

“Go home?” How would it feel to revisit the place where you grew up? At least you’d have your grandmother at your side. Maybe that way you wouldn’t keep expecting her to pop out from behind every tree and boulder. “I do have some fond memories of the place.”

“Some?”

“Oh, you know. Besides me nearly getting eaten by monsters all the time as a tyke, I did get lonesome after you passed away.”

“Right…” She glances over to her windowsill, where she’s got an array of potted plants and vases. You recognize specimens from your different lands – lilac cuttings, a crawling vine of ivy making its way to the floor, red lilies Jaspers isn’t allowed to touch. The largest is a type of orchid you recognize from home. “Those memories aren’t so great.”

“There’s an idea,” you say abruptly. “Your character could be a Captain Nemo type. He had a mysterious island and everything. And he is a sort of villain, even if you might dispute the nobility of his motives.”

“I have in the past piloted something somewhat like a cool submarine,” she agrees.

A winning idea from yours truly. How’s that for a contribution? “Let’s doodle you a nifty uniform,” you say, and she grins and picks up a pen.


End file.
